The cultural challenges of biomedical advances

After the fall of man, evil entered the world and distorted the meaning of all that God created good. Man, created in the image of God, became a commercial object. Medicine, whose primary vocation was to heal and cure people of their suffering, became the human marketplace. Throughout history, medicine has undergone two great revolutions: the biological revolution and the therapeutic revolution. These two revolutions have changed the paradigm of biomedical practice. The biological revolution gave man the three masters: mastery of reproduction, mastery of heredity and mastery of the nervous system. The therapeutic revolution concerns medicine, or more precisely, the ethics of applying recent advances to the treatment and prevention of disease, and the ethics of clinical research. Despite the beneficial effects of these biomedical advances, there are many negative consequences. Christian bioethics is not opposed to biomedical advances. Rather, it points out the inhumane commercial practices condoned by the medical profession.